The Private Lives of Pippa Lee by Rebecca Miller Page A

landed on my bed, its rubbery, black-skinned paddles scrambling over my bare feet. I crept back, terrified and repulsed, shrinking into the corner. The creature settled onto my crumpled bedclothes like a broody hen, then looked at me, somewhat out of breath from its efforts. It had pale, light-soaked eyes. I knew it for an angel, yet it disgusted me. I wondered if I had invoked it with all that praying I’d been doing.
    â€˜I’m sorry,’ I whispered. That seemed to cover everything – both the bad behavior and the excessive prayer. The great wings began to spread; the thing extended itself, stood up; it was the height of a small man, towering over me in that bed. The wings were as wide as a canopy above me. One pale, human arm floated down toward me. I felt its hot hand resting on my head. My eyes were so heavy, I strained to keep them open; the eyelids felt glued together. The thing’s hand was hot, burning; heat surged through my body, then it felt like tiny insects were crawling inside my skin. When the feeling receded, my eyes snapped open. The angel had vanished. I looked around me, frightened, breathless, ran to the open window, shut it, locked it.
    The next morning, I was running a fever. My mother kept me in bed. I wondered what she would think of my angel. Would she believe he was real, and if so, what would his visit signify to her? She would probably think there was something unseemly about it. Suky had a dirty mind. She always leapt to salacious conclusions, about parishioners, politicians, movie stars, using amused disapproval to mask intense interest in anything sexual. Why would my angel be any different? I yearned to tell her, but I was afraid, because I knew she would see my angel as her fault, somehow. My sins were her sins; I was a part of her. That was the way she saw it.

Mr Brown
    I sat through a lifetime of Sunday mornings, and in all that time I can remember only one of my father’s sermons. I don’t know if that is because it was so beautiful or because my father gave it to the congregation on the very day that changed my life. I was sitting in my usual seat in the front row, to Suky’s right. She sat bolt upright, her eyes pinned to my father, eyebrows up, her small, weathered hands clamped together, one foot jiggling as my sleepy brothers slumped, inert, on the other side of her.
    The sermon was about the cross, and how it is made up of both a vertical and a horizontal beam. Christ, my father posited in his growling voice, was those two things: vertical – godly – and horizontal – of the earth, a living creature. Christianity existed where the two lines met. He said that was what was so special about our God. He had been one of us, yet he was endless and almighty. Because I was actually listening to him for once, I truly saw Des at that moment. He was not a tall man. The way he held his short arms out as he described the cross, palms up, as if feeling for drops of rain in a drought, made him seem futile and precious – a man praying for order in a life governed by chaos. I felt so sorry for him. And then I turned, and it happened. I laid eyes on Mr Brown.
    He was sitting across the aisle from me and one row back, beside the Oakley boys, boarders from the local boys’ prep school, in their maroon blazers with light blue crests on the pockets and wrinkled navy slacks. The campus, with its white clapboard buildings and dark green shutters, was, in fact, only a stone’s throw away from my house, across the green. From the first moment, I couldn’t keep my eyes off Mr Brown. He was in his forties andseemed ancient to me at that time. But there was something about his face – a bony, veined face – that seemed deeply good to me. I loved his rust-colored mustache, his balding pate, his ruddy cheeks. Every Sunday after that, I situated myself in a place where I could see him; I even sat right next to him for one thrilling service. All my